1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a face recognition apparatus and method using physiognomic feature information and, more particularly, to a face recognition apparatus and method using physiognomic feature information, which can improve the accuracy of face recognition.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of information-oriented society, identification technology for identifying each individual becomes more and more important. A lot of research into biometric technology that uses human body features to protect personal information and identify respective individuals using computers has been conducted.
Biometric technology, particularly face recognition technology, is considered to be convenient and competitive biometric technology, owing to the advantage thereof wherein the identity of a user can be verified in a contactless manner, unlike recognition technology requiring a special action or behavior on the part of the user, such as fingerprint recognition or iris recognition. Face recognition technology is one of core technologies for a multimedia database (DB) search, and has been widely used in various application fields such as preparing synopses of video containing facial information, identity verification, Human Computer Interface (HCI) image search, security, and monitoring systems.
Conventional face recognition schemes using cameras have been realized in such a way as to use global information about the face, or peripheral information about feature points for determining facial elements. However, when a person recognizes the face of another person, he or she occasionally uses the overall shape of the face, but tends to recognize the face of that person using the unique physiognomic features of the face. That is, information about whether a person has double eyelids, a spot at a specific location, a pointed chin, elongated eyes, or wrinkles at a specific location is used as important information required to identify the person.
In relation to this, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2008-0049394 discloses technology entitled “Preprocessing Method for Face Recognition, Face Recognition Method, and Apparatus Using the Same”.